Tania
How to start your own business?
Currently, I am studying business at college, but I have a passion to have my own clothing line one day, and I'm wondering how could I start it off with no experience and budget. Any advice will be helpful!
#business #entrepreneurship #entrepreneur #clothing #brand #marketing
5 answers
Jonathan Blayer
Jonathan’s Answer
Get to know as many people in or around the industry, entrepreneur want to help other entrepreneurs
Eric Vincent
Eric’s Answer
Hi Tania,
I'm going to agree 1000 percent with Kushaan and just kind of continue from his comment on budget. Yes a small investment to start a budding business will have to be made, but you can also do this in small increments.
For arguments sake lets'say you're not designing the actual clothing but rather a small accessory such as a scarf. You can likely seek out the fabric at a fabric shop or on line, buy a small 3 yard piece and craft your scarf by hand all for less than 30 or 40 dollars. You can then design your business card as simple as just your name and the name of your brand in simple black and white, and buy 100 business cards on line for 10 or 20 dollars. You can launch a free website on wordpress or wix and these are drop and drag construction so you don't have to know code, and launch an Instagram account.
Take your phone and a friend and your scarf and take some photos, post them to insta, do your marketing, post to your website, announce for sale, sell the fact that these are hand made custom order, because in your effort to keep costs low by doing things by hand, you spin that as a positive (People don't have to know) and make that the important fact. Set your price, get an order do another one or two and so on.
The most important thing about starting a business is failing. Yes, failing, falling down, messing up, and just down right being disappointed about it all. That's where you learn, that's where you figure out how to make it better the next time, that's when you seek out answers, or help to things you weren't planning for. Basically it's okay to fall down, you learn from it and you get up and do it again, only better.
There are few overnight successes, we never truly see the back story behind the latest, hottest new product. We rarely see what went into it to make it the big thing, and we rarely know what went into the company that made that next big thing, we just often see the end result of a lot of ups and downs, trys and retry, so be patient and learn as you go, you will succeed.
Final thought.... do not measure your success by profit margins, not yet. When you're company is employing lots of people and dealing with supply chain, worry about financial success, right now your first success celebration will be just getting 1 website, 1 product. You've succeeded in your first step then and you should be proud.
Marcel Badia
Marcel’s Answer
Is a great experience to start building your own company, but the journey is not easy.
Look what you are good at see if is a need out there that you can apply to your business model.
Remember any product in the market can be reshape to your needs.
See if you can provide a different solution to a problem.
Find a market that dont require too much capital to begin once you know what industry you want to jump in, find a mentor that will give you valuable insights.
Kushaan Shah
Kushaan’s Answer
It's fantastic you're trying to start your own clothing line!
The beautiful part about starting any business is that it doesn't have to be huge from the start and doesn't have to be an entirely new product. With marketing and strategic vision, you can still make it succeed despite many other clothing lines existing out there.
Businesses are primarily product driven, process driven or marketing driven. If you have a brand new product that has never been seen or invented before (i.e. Iphone), it will genuinely drive people due to its novelty and possibility for disruption in daily lives. If you have a product that isn't necessarily new (i.e. Warby Parker - they sell glasses) but you see potential on the model being improved, you can improve the process. Warby Parker sends glasses for you to try on so you don't have to go to a store. For something like clothing, I would look at a company like FUBU. They make hats, shoes, and sports wear. Not entirely new, but they way they did their marketing and had people like LL Cool J endorse their brand caused them to skyrocket.
Think about who you would want to target your market too. FUBU was looking at those who liked hip-hop and specifically marketed it to them. Either test your market using survey focused user testing or simply just create some different pieces of clothing to test reactions. You don't need experience as long as you're asking questions, taking good feedback, and continuing to respond to your market.
The unfortunate part is that you do need some sort of budget - this can be relatively small ($1,000) to atleast develop your first products but part of business is understanding that you may lose some money at the start before you grow exposure.
Tooba Durrani
Tooba’s Answer
I would suggest creating a business framework using small business planning templates available online. This would help you in identifying your brand's unique selling proposition, strengths, market, demand, audience and most importantly the resources at hand- this includes monetary investment, your skills relevant to the business, your network, access to social media, any available space for production, product storage or photography. Using this framework you can identify how you can start with the available resources and build a 4P marketing plan that would help you to kick start and adapt to the market dynamics as you go ahead. I would recommend exploring social media as the medium for business, brand awareness and engagement- which has proved to be a a great platform for small business with minimal investment.
Hope this helps! Good luck :)